1.01.2015

Cookie Christmas Party with the Kiddos

The week before Christmas we hosted a Christmas Party for some of our after school kids. We wanted them to experience a real Christmas party, full of yummy desserts, Christmas cheer and love. We also really wanted a special time to share with them about the true meaning of Christmas. In preperation for the party I went on a baking frenzy, which was so much fun, and filled all the Pinterest, Chrsitmas baking needs in my little heart. I have never done this before, the all out baking, one thing after another, thing. I loved it. I made tootsie roll cookies, Mexican wedding cookies, cranberry oatmeal cookies, chocolate fudge oatmeal truffle balls, Andes mint chocolate cookies, egg nog cookies (which were A-MAZING, my new favorite cookie) and decorated sugar cookies.

Sherry came early and helped me decorate the sugar cookies.

The incredibly eggnog cookies! They were the only cookies I used a mix for (besides the sugar cookies ) and turned out to be my favorite. I ate them straight out of the oven so that might have added to their deliciousness. I used this mix that I picked up while in the States.

Ronald and Sherry, who are brother and sister, were so very excited to show us the durian (the stinky feet fruit) cake they made. These two are absolutely precious & just about the sweetest kids you'll ever meet.

Once all the kids got to our house, we kicked the party off with decorating our Christmas tree. The kids loved this. I don't think they've ever really decorated a Christmas tree with their families, so they had tons of fun working together to make our Christmas tree beautiful. And man, did they make it beautiful! Ha. Catherine so lovingly put the look as if "someone threw up (as in vomitted) decorations" all over the tree! Hahahaha. It was cute and very obvious that kids had decorated our trees. I thought to change it when they left but it was just too cute, so I left all their decorations up.

Can we just take a second to admire how many ornaments are on the top of this tiny tree? It was a theme in their decorating, put as many ornaments together as possible and when in doubt always hang them two by two.

Mr. Zachary was a like a little elf handing out all the ornaments one by one.

After Christmas tree decorating, we headed to our kitchen table to decorate these little gingerbread men ornaments I picked up in the States. The States, man. Geesh, there's everything there. And at Target. I bought 2 packs of with 20 gingerbread men in them each. It came with sequence, "buttons", googly eyes, bow ties, and strings, all for $5. It was the best buy ever.

Also, can I just say that we taught them the English name of the 'googly eyes' and it was precious and hilarious hearing them say 'googly eyes' over and over. I loved it. It was music to my heart, really.

All the momma's while their kiddos worked on their gingerbread men.

Annddd back to the gingerbread men decorating. This activity took ages but they thoroughly enjoyed it the whole time.

After finally finishing the decorating of their gingerbread men, we played a round of Oral English charades. Basically the opposite of charades, in that, instead of using their body to act it out, they had to use only their English words, no motions, to explain the word on their card. They had tons of fun! We then played 'pin the mustache on Santa' which I thought was going to be way more hilarious then it was because they were just too darn good! I wanted mustaches like all over our walls but they were too good for that.

After we played games & ate tons of cookies, the kids sat down and we showed them a short video cartoon about the true meaning of Christmas, the birth of Jesus.

After the video we played a slide show of our time with them over the past 2 years. They loved it! They were cracking up remembering old memories & the things we had done together. Geesh. I love these kids so much, it's going to be hard to leave them next month.

*Also, I hate that all these pictures are so blurry! But I really want to remember these moments, so blurry pictures it is.